Interpreting the American City

rT HE idea that the city in the United States and in Canada could be viewed as laboratory in which to investigate the development of distinctive urban culture was first explored systematically by Robert Park more than half century ago.1 proposition that cities in the United States were generators of impulses whose influence was being diffused far beyond their boundaries and that they therefore needed to be accounted for in interpreting the nation's history was advanced shortly thereafter by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in his seminal volume, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898.2 These two concepts that the city is center where economic and social initiatives quicken the pace of cultural change and that the city is the source from which have spread the ideas and institutions that increasingly have defined the life of the nation have served as the principal guides to most of the subsequent research on cities of the United States and Canada. This paper will illustrate the development of these two themes with reference to historical and geographical studies of the American city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An assessment of the achievements of interpreters of the city will suggest the need for reformulation of research questions in order to present coherent concept of the city. When Park described the city as a state of mind, body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this

Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · History · Philippine History and Culture

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